Dance with the Dragon Read online

  “I never said that you were,” McGarvey told her, intrigued despite himself. Seeing her now, and listening to her, he could just imagine what the riverside rides had been all about. But Toni’s assessment of the girl was probably spot on. None of what McGarvey was hearing made any real sense. What the hell was she doing in Mexico, if not spying for the MOIS?

  “My father had just been promoted and assigned to the American desk, and General Baranov came from Moscow to brief him. He was an important man.”

  All the air left the room, but McGarvey was careful to hide his reaction, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Rencke had caught it too. If it was the same Baranov that McGarvey had dealt with in Mexico City and had eventually killed in East Berlin, then whatever he’d been doing in Tehran had to have been important.

  “What did he have to say about me?” McGarvey asked.

  “That you were a dangerous man,” Shahrzad replied. “He had a great deal of respect for you. He told my father that unless someone were to put a bullet in your brain, you would probably run the CIA someday. And he said that would be a disaster for us. I think he was planning on killing you, and he might have wanted my father’s help. I didn’t hear that part.”

  “What did you call him?” McGarvey asked.

  Shahrzad was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “How did you address the man? General Baranov? Sir? What?”

  “At first, General, but later he asked me to call him by his Christian name, Valentin.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen,” she said.

  “Didn’t your father raise any objections about you riding off into the wilderness with no one else but the general? I would have.”

  Shahrzad’s eyes lowered. “The general told us about you, and I remembered your name, that’s all. I didn’t know who else to talk to. With Louis gone I was alone down there, and I wanted to get out.”

  “Why not go to your family in Paris?” McGarvey asked.

  She looked away and didn’t answer.

  “Maybe because your mother kicked you out of the house?”

  “Merde,” she said softly. “I wanted to come here, to the United States. This is where I wanted to live. But since bin Laden and the al-Qaida attacks I couldn’t get a visa.”

  “Arabs are not well liked,” Perry suggested.

  “I’m Persian, not Arab.”

  Perry hid a slight smile. “Whatever.” He waved her off.

  “There is a difference,” she said sadly. “Louis knew it.”

  It came to McGarvey that the woman was battered. Some turn of fate had knocked her down, and she was having a nearly impossible time getting back up. She was like the victim of a brutal rape who believed she would never get clean again. The question was what she wanted.

  “Why did you go to Mexico?” he asked. “Were you planning on sneaking across the border on foot?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. She fingered the heavy gold braided chain around her neck. “When I left Tehran I had only a few thousand French and Swiss francs, and a few pieces of jewelry—this necklace my father gave me on my twenty-first birthday.”

  She was wearing a diamond ring that looked to be four or five carats on her right hand. “Your father give that to you too?” McGarvey asked.

  She dropped her hand and said, “No,” but then thought better of it. “It wasn’t for my birthday,” she added.

  “One of the presents from the general?”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but then shook her head in a gesture of irritation. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Do you know who killed Louis Updegraf?” McGarvey asked.

  She just looked at him.

  “Why he was killed?”

  She said nothing.

  McGarvey pushed away from the table and got to his feet. “Sorry, Perry, but she’s all yours. I’d suggest that you take her back to whatever Mexican sewer she crawled out of and dump her.”

  “Wait!” she cried.

  “Let’s go,” McGarvey told Rencke. “We can meet Katy for lunch.”

  “Please wait, you salopard!” Shahrzad screeched, tipping over the edge for just a moment.

  McGarvey looked at her. She seemed lost, and vulnerable, completely strung out, at wit’s end.

  She sat stock still for several seconds before she lowered her eyes again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been telling lies for so long that I’m not sure if I know the truth.”

  “You came to us,” McGarvey said. “You wanted to talk to me. Here I am.”

  “I don’t know who killed Louis, or exactly why, but I have my ideas.”

  McGarvey glanced at Perry and then looked out at the Gulf. The water this morning was almost flat calm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Katy was right, it was time finally to retire all the way. Sail their boat, travel, work on another book, take long naps on weekday afternoons, play golf or tennis. Yet when Otto had shown up on his doorstep he hadn’t turned his old friend away. He’d insisted that he was retired, yet he had come out here to listen to this woman, and find out what was going on in Mexico that had gotten a CIA field officer shot to death. And now that he had come this far he was back in the game.

  He turned back to her. She was lying to them, and he was going to find out why. “How old are you?”

  She started to speak, but then held off for a moment. “Thirty,” she said.

  “Who gave you the ring?”

  “General Baranov.”

  “Did you have sex with him when you were fifteen?”

  Her nostrils flared, and her eyes darted from Perry to Rencke and back to McGarvey. “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “Yes it is,” McGarvey told her. “Because I suspect that you were having sex with Updegraf, and I want to establish a motive.”

  “I was in love with Louis. It’s something you have to understand from the beginning.”

  “Did you have sex with Baranov?”

  Again her eyes darted to Perry and Rencke. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “He raped me.”

  TEN

  LONGBOAT KEY

  Rencke poured a glass of sangria for Shahrzad, and after she’d taken a sip, he gave her a sad smile. “It must have been terribly difficult for you, all alone in Mexico City, not knowing a soul.”

  She nodded. “Mr. McGarvey was right. I figured that I could find work, and as soon as I had saved enough money I could head north, maybe to the Texas border, and get into the States. But I wanted to do it right, I wanted to have the correct papers, and my green card.”

  “And did you find work so that you could save some money?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes, but it wasn’t easy.”

  “Easy enough so that you weren’t forced to sell your necklace or ring.”

  “I didn’t have anything else,” Shahrzad flared. “Once they were gone I’d be stuck.” She looked away for a moment. “It was degrading. All the men were just like you; when they looked at me they thought I was a whore.”

  McGarvey wanted to feel sorry for her, but he wasn’t convinced that it was anything more than a very good performance. “Belly dancing?”

  She started to answer, but Perry cut her off. “Not quite belly dancing,” he said. He gave Shahrzad a disparaging look as if he were examining a bug under a microscope. “I believe the euphemism for what she did is exotic dancing, though I don’t believe it has any connection with either.”

  “It paid good money,” she said.

  “Downtown is filled with those sorts of establishments,” Perry said. “Especially in Polanco and Zona Rosa. Strip joints. Lap dancing. Massage parlors. And much worse.”

  “That’s where you met Updegraf?” McGarvey asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did he tell you that he worked for the CIA?”

  “Not at first.”

  “But you spotted him in the audience, and you danced for him in particul
ar,” McGarvey said. “I just want to get this part clear in my mind. Why him?”

  “He was sort of handsome. And he was very nice. A kind man.”

  “He was a rich American who could help you get to America,” McGarvey suggested. He was getting a pretty fair idea where this was going. But he wanted to hear the details from the girl’s own mouth.

  “That too, at first,” she admitted. “But he didn’t hit on me, which I really appreciated, you know. He was a gentleman in that respect.”

  McGarvey refrained from asking in what respects Updegraf hadn’t been a gentleman, because he thought he might already know the answer. Anyway, the subject was going to come up soon. “How often did you dance at the clubs?”

  “It was the same club,” she said. “The Wild Stallion in Zona Rosa. I danced five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, from eleven until three in the morning.”

  “How often did Updegraf show up to catch your act?”

  “After the first couple of times, he was there just about every night I danced.”

  “Did he ask you to sit with him at his table, buy you drinks?”

  “At first.”

  “Did he give you presents, like the general had done?”

  Her jaw tightened. “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It was never like that.”

  McGarvey turned to Perry. “What the hell was one of your field officers doing there? Or was that where his code clerk hung out?”

  Perry spread his hands. “I don’t know. There was nothing in any of his encounter sheets that he was doing the club scene. Supposedly he was meeting the code clerk at a coffee bar just around the corner from the embassy.”

  “Sounds to me like he was playing with fire,” Rencke suggested.

  “Was General Liu also one of your admirers?” McGarvey asked, taking a stab in the dark.

  Shahrzad was about to take a drink, but her hand suddenly shook so badly she nearly dropped the glass. “I didn’t know anything about him until much later,” she blurted. She turned to Rencke as if she wanted help. “The club was always packed. It was almost impossible to pick someone out of the crowd. They all looked the same to me.”

  “Except for Updegraf,” McGarvey said.

  “He stood out.”

  “I’ll bet he did,” McGarvey said drily. “When did you start having sex with him?”

  She took a moment to answer, and when she did she hung her head, the gesture almost theatrical. “It was about a week or so after I first saw him that I started doing lap dances for him in one of the private rooms.”

  “I assume that he paid you for those sessions, and you had to share the money with your boss.”

  She nodded. “But then I fell in love with him,” she said. “He was kind and gentle, and he had a good sense of humor.”

  “You knew that he was married,” McGarvey said.

  She nodded again. “It’s why we never could go to his place. And my apartment was a dump, so we had to use the club.” She smiled with the memory. “It was perfect at first. He liked to watch me dance, and afterward we would make love.” She looked up. “He was a sweet man. I’m going to miss him.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” McGarvey said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she replied softly. “I loved him.”

  “He gave you money for the dancing. Did he pay you for the sex?”

  Her eyes suddenly filled. “I was in love with him. And I think that he was in love with me.”

  “But he gave you money,” McGarvey persisted. He was almost certain where this was going now, and he was disgusted. Updegraf had recruited her by playing the role of the perfect gentleman, and it would have been easy for a woman in Shahrzad’s state to believe in him. “I want to be clear on this point before we continue.”

  She glanced at Rencke and Perry, who were offering no help. “He knew that I wanted to go north, and he promised to help me.”

  “In exchange for what?” McGarvey asked. They were finally coming to the point. “I mean other than the dancing and the sex.”

  This time she managed to take a drink with a steady hand, and McGarvey had to admire her resilience and her ability to compose herself. She must have been a dream come true for Updegraf, who was a field officer with at least as much ambition to make his mark as Perry. The girl was not only bright and beautiful, but also vulnerable, willing to do whatever the man she’d fallen in love with told her to do.

  Yet there was more than just that. He could see in her eyes that she was embarrassed by some of what she was telling them, and she had to look away. And he could see it in the way she held herself, as if it had been so long since she had truly relaxed, and perhaps shared a laugh with a friend, that she had no idea that such a thing was even possible.

  Solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence. We all bore the burdens at one point or another. McGarvey’s was in the early morning hours, when he would awaken from his dreams bathed in sweat. Sometimes Katy would be awake, and she would hold him until his heart stopped pounding. But most of the time she was sound asleep and he would be alone. Shahrzad never had someone to hold her close, and tell her that she was loved, and be telling the truth.

  “It was a Thursday night when the club usually wasn’t so busy that I had to sit with too many other customers, when Louis and I went back to our room and I started to dance for him,” she started. “He wasn’t himself that night. He was watching me, but I don’t think that he was really seeing me, you know.”

  Rencke nodded, encouraging her to continue.

  “It was the same when we made love. It was as if he wasn’t there with me. He was someplace else. And it hurt. I thought that it was probably the beginning of the end for us, which made me really sad. Like I said, I was in love with him, and for goodness’ sake, I thought he was in love with me. But right then I wasn’t so sure.

  “Afterward when we got dressed he liked to have a cigarette and a bottle of champagne. I had never smoked before, but I smoked with him. Because of him.” She was looking inward now. “I don’t think he realized that I was making little sacrifices like that for him.” She shrugged. “But it didn’t matter as long as we were together.”

  “And he was paying you so that you could get to the U.S.,” McGarvey said sharply, not sure why he was baiting her, except that he still wasn’t sure if she was genuine, or an MOIS double.

  She ignored the gibe. “Sometimes we would talk, mostly about little things. You know, about baseball, about Ghirardelli Square, about South Beach, places I wanted to visit.”

  “But not that night,” McGarvey prompted.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. She looked up as if she were coming out of a daze. “Not that night. He said that he wanted me to help him with something. ‘Anything you want, Louis,’ I told him. And I meant it, and he believed me, because he admitted that he was an American spy.”

  “God in heaven,” Perry blurted.

  “He wanted me to find out about some people. If I did that for him, he would make sure that I would get a real visa to come to America, and that I would never have to worry about money again.”

  “The bastard lost his mind,” Perry muttered.

  “No,” Shahrzad cried. “He said this was very important. The most important job of his career. More important than I or anyone else could possibly imagine. And we were going to be the heroes.”

  “You were to become a spy for him,” McGarvey said.

  “That’s right.”

  “The Chinese?”

  She went a little pale and her hand shook as she reached for her glass. “That’s right,” she said. “But mostly just one man. An important man. General Liu.”

  ELEVEN

  LONGBOAT KEY

  They took a short break. Toni was summoned to escort Shahrzad to the bathroom, and when they were out of earshot McGarvey was the first to speak.

  “If she’s here of her own free will, why the babysitter?” So many things weren’t adding up in his mind that he didn’t k
now where to begin.

  “One of my people was shot to death, after all,” Perry said earnestly. “I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Beyond the ones that you’ve already taken,” McGarvey said.

  Perry’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean. What chances?”

  McGarvey had to wonder if anyone told the truth. “Updegraf had to be a busy man, running a one-man show with just the help of the girl.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it. We’ve already established that much.” Perry waved his hand in a sweeping gesture toward where Shahrzad had been sitting. “All of this is news to me.”

  “I understand,” McGarvey said. “But your field officer was a busy man. Gone all hours of the day and night. You must have noticed something.”

  “He was going after his code clerk.”

  “A lot of work for a code clerk, wouldn’t you say?” McGarvey asked rhetorically. “But you had to be taking a big chance that with all that activity, something else might have been going on. Something that as station chief you would be responsible for.”

  A sudden shrewdness came into Perry’s eyes, a sudden understanding of what McGarvey was getting at and how best to respond. “Every chief of station worth his salt has his own philosophy. My method is to allow my senior officers the latitude to develop their own sources without hindrance. If they strike gold, or even if they catch a glimmer, they come to me and we put our heads together. Come up with a winning strategy. Heavens, man, I’m a spy, not a paper pusher. Surely you of all men can understand.”

  “But Updegraf wasn’t playing by the rules. I’d say that a senior Chinese intelligence officer was something more than just a glimmer.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Perry cried, throwing his hands up.

  “Something, I suppose.” McGarvey shrugged. “It was your man who got himself killed. Is there anything else about Updegraf that I should know about? Anything that’s not in his jacket or his OPR?” McGarvey asked. An OPR was an Officer Performance Report that was written every year by an agent’s immediate supervisor.